Google’s effort in the area of localization of content is unmatched. At anytime hundreds of Google engineers are involved in coming up with solutions for people who do not read or understand English language.
With Google Fonts platform, they have bought hundreds of free fonts at the disposal of web publishers from around the world. However, majority of fonts listed are for English language only.
Now, Google has gone ahead and added support for all world languages in one free single font – Google Noto. The single unified Noto font supports nearly all the languages around the world, including Simplified Chinese, Taditional Chinese, Devnagari, Japanese and many more.
While Noto font was previously available only for few selected languages, now they have gone ahead and added support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) for Noto Sans variant.
The Noto Sans CJK font is a sans serif typeface designed as an intermediate style between the modern and traditional. It is intended to be a multi-purpose digital font for user interface designs, digital content, reading on laptops, mobile devices, and electronic books. The font was developed in partnership with Adobe.
The reason why CJK font is significant is because Chinese, Japanese and Korean readers represent approximately one quarter of the world’s population.
Currently, Noto covers all major languages of the world and many others, including European, African, Middle Eastern, Indic, South and Southeast Asian, Central Asian, American, and East Asian languages. Several minority and historical languages are also supported. .
Why Unified Font Is Important?
Imagine if you had a multi-lingual webpage which had 4 or 5 different languages. The web publisher needed to use different fonts which would have different typefaces and obviously will not go well with each other. Now, with launch of unified Google Noto font, the look and feel of all the fonts even in different languages is consistent all across.
Google Noto will be of immense value not only for multi-lingual web publishers, but also print magazines or posters or any other publication that uses multiple languages.
Check out Google Noto Font in various languages that are very different from each other, but clearly give impression of being from a same font family.
If you are a online or print publisher, you should give Google Noto font a serious thought. It is sure to bring finesse and consistency in your typography!